Michael Vandenbergh

Vanderbilt University | Vander Bilt · Law School

The United States recently passed major federal laws supporting the energy transition. Analyses suggest that their successful implementation could reduce US emissions more than 40% below 2005 levels by 2030. However, achieving maximal emissions reductions would require frictionless supply and demand responses to the laws’ incentives and implementat...

Political polarization is a barrier to enacting policy solutions to global issues. Social psychology has a rich history of studying polarization, and there is an important opportunity to define and refine its contributions to the present political realities. We do so in the context of one of the most pressing modern issues: climate change. We synth...

Significant greenhouse gas emission reductions can come from changing consumer behaviors. While the technical mitigation potential of such changes is known, evidence of their feasibility is less abundant. In a pre-registered international survey with mostly North American and European participants (n = 7,349), we examined the predictors and interre...

Political polarization is a barrier to enacting policy solutions to global issues. Social psychology has a rich history of studying polarization, and there is an important opportunity to refine and define its contributions to the present political realities. We do so in the context of one of the most pressing modern issues: climate change. We synth...

Efforts to achieve emissions targets often fall short. Science can help meet the targets by assessing the feasibility of initiatives proposed to reach them, focusing on issues of adoption and implementation and the behavioural plasticity of intended responders.

In the struggle to mitigate anthropogenic threats to environmental systems, science has made great progress identifying and quantifying the potential of various mitigation initiatives. It has made less progress in identifying and assessing how those initiatives will affect their targets and whether those initiatives can be adopted given the constra...

Purpose Given the potential of individual behavior change to address environmental issues, organizations such as universities have explored ways to significantly reduce energy use in workplaces and on campuses. With approximately 500,000 to 1,500,000 fume hoods operating in the U.S., and their corresponding aggregate electricity use of 26 TWh/year,...

In your editorial „How researchers can help fight climate change in 2022 and beyond” you rightly emphasize the value of emerging energy supply and end-use technologies for achieving much needed though highly ambitious GHG emission reductions. However, meeting this goal at the necessary speed is not solely a technical problem. There is a long histor...

Carbon labelling systems can inform individual and organizational choices, which potentially reduce the carbon footprints of goods and services. We review the ways labelling is conceptualized and operationalized, and the available evidence on effectiveness. The literature focuses mainly on how labelling affects retail consumer behaviour, but much l...

This Article examines the role of private environmental governance (PEG) in climate change adaptation. PEG occurs when private organizations perform traditionally governmental functions such as providing public goods and reducing negative externalities. PEG initiatives that target climate change mitigation have expanded rapidly in the last decade a...

Finding routes to inspire political conservatives’ support for climate change mitigation is crucial in the United States. In an experiment with U.S. participants, we found that conservatives and moderates are more supportive of climate change mitigation when exposed to information about mitigation actions taken by the private sector. These results...

This Essay outlines a simple heuristic that will enable public and private policymakers to focus on the most important climate change mitigation strategies. Policymakers face a dizzying array of information, pressure from advocacy groups, and policy options, and it is easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. Many policy options are attractiv...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

Limiting global warming to 2ºC or less relative to pre-industrial temperatures will require unprecedented rates of decarbonization globally. The scale and scope of transformational change required across sectors and actors in society raises critical questions of feasibility. Much of the literature on mitigation pathways addresses technological and...

The growing sense of urgency by the public for action to address climate change stands in stark contrast to the slow pace and limited accomplishments of national and international institutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Political institutions face significant structural barriers to taking strong and rapid action to cut emissions, but priva...

Employee energy benefits (EEBs), such as subsidies for employee home energy audits and financial incentives for carpooling to work, aim to influence employees’ environmental behaviors outside of work. Exploring these understudied benefits would offer new insights that can enrich theories of employer and employee motivations for engaging in environm...

The growing recognition that climate change mitigation alone will be inadequate has led scientists and policymakers to discuss climate geoengineering. An experiment with a US sample found, contrary to previous research, that reading about geoengineering did not reduce conservatives’ skepticism about the existence of anthropogenic climate change. Mo...

Correcting misperceptions provides an opportunity to reduce household GHG emissions across multiple domains. Now research shows that consumers greatly underestimate emissions from foods, but these misperceptions can be successfully corrected with carbon labelling.

Urban and suburban lawns make up a large share of land use in the US. Maintaining lawns to fulfill aesthetic norms has environmental consequences. In this analysis, we examine household decisions to apply nitrogen-containing lawn fertilizer. Using survey data of 298 households in Nashville, Tennessee, we first examine the prevalence of fertilizer u...

Tyler's (2006) Procedural Justice Theory has received support in a variety of studies using criminal justice authorities as the research focus. To date, the theory has not been empirically tested using corporate malfeasance as an outcome, despite evidence that procedural justice is important in achieving regulatory compliance. This study uses facto...

Policymakers have recently looked to the social sciences for effective strategies to address environmental issues, including how to change people’s environmental behaviors. During that time, social scientists have been challenged to improve how they assess, summarize, and convey the state of environmental social science. Meta-analysis, the quantita...

The extent to which individuals’ beliefs about environmental issues are accurate is vitally important, given the myriad ways in which individual behaviors influence environmental outcomes (Dietz, Gardner, Gilligan, Stern, & Vandenbergh, 2009; Vandenbergh, Barkenbus, & Gilligan, 2008). This article examines how people’s common misperceptions of the...

Private sector action provides one of the most promising opportunities to reduce the risks of climate change, buying time while governments move slowly or even oppose climate mitigation. Starting with the insight that much of the resistance to climate mitigation is grounded in concern about the role of government, this books draws on law, policy, s...

This Article explores whether a private governance initiative can harness legacy concerns to address climate change. The socio-temporal trap is an important barrier to climate change mitigation: The costs of reducing carbon emissions will be incurred by this generation, but most of the benefits will accrue to future generations. Research suggests t...

Providing carbon footprint labels for all food products is a daunting and potentially infeasible project. Knowing how consumers substitute away from high carbon goods and what they choose as substitutes is essential for understanding which goods are likely to result in meaningful reductions in carbon emissions. This paper proposes a model to system...

Many have speculated that increased attention to climate change adaptation will reduce support for mitigation. The Risk Compensation Hypothesis suggests that remedies to reduce the impacts of risky behaviors can unintentionally increase those behaviors. The Risk Salience Hypothesis suggests that information about adaptation may increase the salienc...

State implementation of new Environmental Protection Agency climate regulation may shift behavioural strategies from sidelines to forefront of US climate policy.

Providing carbon footprint labels for all food products is a daunting and potentially infeasible project. Knowing how consumers substitute away from high carbon goods and what they choose as substitutes is essential for understanding which goods are likely to result in meaningful reductions in carbon emissions. This paper proposes a model to system...

Individual behavior is an important aspect of climate mitigation. After an initial focus on large industrial sources, developments in the social and behavioral sciences and legal theory in the 1990s and early 2000s have supported the development of new initiatives targeted at individuals and households. The initiatives have included local, state, a...

Much of energy policy is driven by concerns about climate change. Views about the importance of carbon emissions affect debates on topics ranging from the regulation of electricity generation and transmission to the need for incentives to develop emerging technologies. Government efforts to fund and communicate climate science have been extraordina...

Drawing on the emerging private governance literature and the results of an empirical study, this Article explores whether legacy concerns can be harnessed to address climate change. The socio-temporal trap is an important barrier to climate change mitigation: the costs of reducing carbon emissions will be incurred by this generation, but most of t...

Environmental law has long been viewed as a public law field, with policymakers and practitioners conditioned to look to government for solutions to environmental problems, but private governance is playing an increasingly important role. Will private environmental governance become a mainstay of environmental law and policy, or is it another passi...

This comment provides a brief empirical snapshot of the environmental law scholarship published in top general law reviews and environmental law journals for academic years 2008-2009, 2009-2010, 2010-2011, and 2011-2012. The analysis suggests that over 400 environmental law articles were published each year in these journals. The articles included...

Multiple government and health organizations recommend the use of warm or hot water in publications designed to educate the public on best practices for washing one's hands. This is despite research suggesting that the use of an elevated water temperature does not improve handwashing efficacy, but can cause hand irritation. There is reason to belie...

Environmental law has quietly transformed from a positive law field deeply rooted in administrative law to one that is also heavily rooted in private law and private governance. After two decades (1970-1990) of remarkable activity, more than two decades have now passed without a major federal environmental statute (1991-2012). Whether the appropria...

This Essay argues for consideration of political opportunity costs in the criteria used to evaluate climate policy instruments. Law and policy debates typically evaluate policy instruments by their expected performance after adoption, tacitly excluding consideration of the timing of adoption. Under this standard, a comprehensive carbon pricing inst...

Carbon labeling has been proposed as a way to fill gaps in governmental efforts to reduce the impact of human activity on global climate. Carbon labels can provide information that allows producers and consumers to develop and choose lower-impact products, but they have not become widespread in part because of difficulties developing valid and reli...

Like many fields, energy law has had its ups and downs. A period of remarkable activity in the 1970s and early 1980s focused on the efficiencies arising from deregulation of energy markets, but the field attracted much less attention during the 1990s. In the last decade, a new burst of activity has occurred, driven largely by the implications of en...

This Article examines a principal barrier to reducing U.S. carbon emissions — electricity distributors’ financial incentives to sell more of their product — and introduces the concept of net demand reduction (“NDR”) as a primary goal for the modern energy regulatory system. Net electricity demand must decrease substantially from projected levels fo...

This comment provides a brief empirical snapshot of the environmental law scholarship published in top general law reviews and environmental law journals for academic years 2008-2009, 2009-2010, and 2010-2011. The analysis suggests that over 400 environmental law articles were published each year in these journals. The articles included for each ye...

Over the past several years, labeling schemes that focus on a wide range of environmental and social metrics have proliferated. Although little empirical evidence has been generated with respect to carbon footprint labels, much can be learned from our experience with similar product labels. We first review the theory and evidence on the influence o...

Substantial energy efficiency gains can be achieved in the household sector if policymakers adopt the key elements of the most successful past programs and scale these programs to national coverage. Achieving substantial reductions in carbon emissions from the individual and household sector will require laws and policies that combine financial inc...

Parties frequently seek exemption from regulation on the ground that they contribute only a very small share to a problem. These one percent arguments are not inherently questionable; it can be efficient to exclude relatively small contributors. These arguments for exemption garner broad acceptance in part because they appeal to behavioral biases t...

A global private carbon-labelling scheme for consumer products could fill the climate-policy gap by influencing the behaviour of consumers and corporate supply chains.

Administrative agencies have long proceeded on the assumption that individuals respond to regulations in ways that are consistent with traditional rational actor theory, but that is beginning to change. Agencies are now relying on behavioral economics to develop regulations that account for responses that depart from common sense and common wisdom,...

Drawing on the recent financial crisis, we introduce the concept of macro-risk. We distinguish between micro-risks, which can be managed within conventional economic frameworks, and macro-risks, which threaten to disrupt economic systems so much that a different approach is required. We argue that catastrophic climate change is a prime example of a...

This paper develops a theory of voluntary provision of a public good in which a household’s decision to engage in a form of environmentally friendly behavior is based on the desire to offset another behavior that is environmentally harmful. The model generates predictions about (1) participation in a green-electricity program at the extensive and i...

The time is ripe to identify additional politically viable, low-cost, nonintrusive strategies to reduce carbon emissions. This article examines how laws and policies can reduce U.S. carbon emissions by 7% or more by inducing changes in household technology adoption and use. This “behavioral wedge” of emissions reductions will buy time for a stronge...

The individual and household sector accounts for roughly 40 percent of United States energy use and carbon dioxide emissions, yet the laws and policies directed at reductions from this sector often reflect a remarkably simplistic model of behavior. This Essay addresses one of the obstacles to achieving a “behavioral wedge” of individual and househo...

Authors' Viewpoint.

In their Policy Forum (“Behavior and energy policy,” 5 March, p. [1204][1]), H. Allcott and S. Mullainathan identify an important opportunity for reducing energy consumption inexpensively by applying behavioral science. Even larger opportunities can be realized, however, by combining behavioral

When nations fail to agree, can individual citizens make a difference? The third of our post-Copenhagen features is by Jonathan Gilligan, Thomas Dietz, Gerald T. Gardner, Paul C. Stern, and Michael P. Vandenbergh. They look at the effects that voluntary actions by individuals can have, and at the policies that can best encourage such actions.

This article provides a critical missing piece to the global climate change governance puzzle: how to create incentives for the major developing countries to reduce carbon emissions. The major developing countries are projected to account for 80% of the global emissions growth over the next several decades, and substantial reductions in the risk of...

Most climate change policy attention has been addressed to long-term options, such as inducing new, low-carbon energy technologies and creating cap-and-trade regimes for emissions. We use a behavioral approach to examine the reasonably achievable potential for near-term reductions by altered adoption and use of available technologies in US homes an...

Despite the large contribution of individuals and households to climate change, little has been done in the US to reduce the CO2 emissions attributable to this sector. Motor vehicle idling among individual private citizens is one behavior that may be amenable to large-scale policy interventions. Currently, little data are available to quantify the...

We have been asked to examine climate change justice by discussing the methods of allocating the costs of addressing climate change among nations. Our analysis suggests that climate and justice goals cannot be achieved by better allocating the emissions reduction burdens of current carbon mitigation proposals — there may be no allocation of burdens...

Private equity offsets are a partial solution to the difficult justice issues raised on the global level by climate change. Equity offsets allow individuals to follow their moral intuitions about the global differences in carbon emissions and the impact of global warming on individual lives. An active equity offset market could precede a post-Kyoto...

In this article, we explore the implications of this literature for understanding the relationship between climate change policies and consumption. We identify a number of ways in which accounting for the implications of the new happiness literature could lead to laws and policies that influence consumption in ways that increase the prospects for r...

To achieve the level of greenhouse gas emissions reductions called for by climate change experts, officials and policy analysts may need to develop an unfamiliar category of regulated entity: the consumer. Although industrial, manufacturing, retail, and service sector firms undoubtedly will remain the focus of climate change policy in the near term...

The individual and household sector generates roughly 30 to 40 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and is a potential source of prompt and large emissions reductions. Yet the assumption that only extensive government regulation will generate substantial reductions from the sector is a barrier to change, particularly in a political environment...

The central problem confronting climate change scholars and policymakers is how to create incentives for China and the United States to make prompt, large emissions reductions. China recently surpassed the United States as the largest greenhouse gas emitter, and its projected future emissions far outstrip those of any other nation. Although the Uni...

International attention to carbon dioxide emissions is turning to an individual's contribution, or “carbon footprint.” Calculators that estimate an individual's CO2 emissions have become more prevalent on the internet. Even with similar inputs, however, these calculators can generate varying results, often by as much as several metric tons per annu...

Reducing the risk of catastrophic climate change will require leveling off greenhouse gas emissions over the short term and reducing emissions by an estimated 60-80% over the long term. To achieve these reductions, we argue that policymakers and regulators should focus not only on factories and other industrial sources of emissions but also on indi...